Tag Archives: repair center

The non-profit Ghana Together has been repairing and deploying donated XOs in Axim, Ghana for years – now providing over 50 XOs in their Children’s Home. They and work with local techs and a student repair center at the Arts and Technology High School in Marysville, WA. They recently wrote about helping a nearby school that suddenly received XOs.

“What about Those One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Computers?”

In 2011 the Methodist School was suddenly given 30 OLPCs from the government of Ghana.. .They thought they looked liked toys, not realizing that they are actually very sophisticated “learning machines” for primary school children. The headmistress found out that I was coming to Axim, and asked me to come and do an impromptu two-hour workshop.

Consequently, two teachers worked with me to test and update laptops. I engaged Peter Asuah, one of the original WHH scholars, to help test all the OLPCs, chargers, etc. I left a very complete manual… These guys are computer sophisticated, and I’m sure they will do a good job orienting the children.

Since the machines are designed to be “self-exploratory”, it’s been my experience that once children understand the basic way the computer functions, they do very well on their own. In fact, this hands-on, exploration approach is perfect for these children, because they have been so immersed in rote learning from blackboard and exercise books. The science teachers told me they are trying to get away from that kind of teaching, but up to now, they didn’t have materials to work with… now they have materials and machines.

Later in my visit, when the science teachers came up for the brainstorming session, I spent the first hour on another impromptu workshop, introducing them to the basic workings of the OLPC. They were fascinated…

Meanwhile, if anyone reading this has an OLPC you’d like to donate, we’d like to have it, in working condition or not. The Marysville Club is very skilled — they repair them, or if need be cannibalize them.

With roughly 4,000 laptops deployed, we’re still in the beginning stages of the initiative. It’s a good stage to be in, especially for building our technical support in advance. So what’s the best way of doing that?

One idea that has been proposed: setting up partnerships with students at Afghan universities. We’d recruit teams of student volunteers to provide ongoing support to teachers and pilot projects. Throughout the whole process, OLPC would provide ongoing support, feedback, access to spare parts and technical advice. Of course there are still a lot of details to iron out. Right now we’re planning to call it the Afghanistan Children’s Connectivity Project, involving individual Connectivity Centers in community hubs in each region.

This year, the United States Government requested $105.9 billion for military operations in Afghanistan. The numbers break down into $68.1 billion requested by the Department of Defense for 2010 and a $33 billion supplement requested by the Administration to support the 30,000 person troop surge in the area. It’s funny to think that providing every child in the country with an XO would cost about $800 million — or 3 days of that military spending.